Contact Google Maps?

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Does anyone know how to send feedback to Google Maps? In the last few months they have (a) tried to kill me and (b) worked with Republicans in Orange County to steal several hundred dollars. Is this deliberate or (more likely) just stupid programmers?

Predicting the Future of Gun Control after Las Vegas

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It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

But some things are easy and this is one of them. The NRA and Congress will use the “bump stock” as a sacrificial scape goat to avoid doing anything real about gun control. They will regulate the bump stock, or possibly even outlaw it, and call it a day.

No real issues will be addressed. No problems will be solved. Cowardice and stupidity will reign. The can will be kicked down the road one more time.

Business as usual.

The Minimum Necessary in the Current Situation

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The time and emotional issues of getting ready to move by the end of the year, of getting any academic applications in before the end of the year, and other things, has meant that I can not spend as much time on this blog as I would like.

From time to time, however, short notes will be posted, if for no other reason than to remind me to go back and do a better, more reasoned, hopefully more humorous treatment of a topic.

Today's short note is my concise opinion for what has to be done to restore democracy and legitimacy to this country. It is the second issue, legitimacy, that is the most tricky and the most controversial. Every government that has ever existed has at one time or another done something that violates its laws, its ethics and the trust it has with the people. We understand that.

But what the politicians and some people do not understand is that you can not do that indefinitely without severe consequences. And the consequences are that the government loses legitimacy in the eyes of the people.  The people no longer believe you, their representatives, that you are representing them. They no longer trust the government to do the right thing. They believe that their government has been captured by the wealthy, that justice is for the rich, and that the system is corrupt.

The point is, you only have to address these problems if you want a country where people trust their government, pay their taxes, obey the laws and fight the wars.

Briefly, this is the minimum I think that has to happen after 30 years or more of betrayal and kicking the can down the road. Everything below is self explanatory.

1. We need to change the constitution to define when an election is invalid and what to do about it. In this case, we have an election that was thrown by a foreign power and resulted in a person who was not elected and who is the least qualified president in our history. We need a way to declare an election invalid and hold another one.

2. We probably need to eliminate the electoral college. Twice in my life time, for a minimum of three presidential terms of office (two under Bush and one under Trump) a person has been put into the office of the presidency who did not, in the opinion of the people, win that election.

3. We need a way to ensure that officials of an administration obey the letter and the spirit of the law. We currently have a head of the EPA that is doing everything possible to see to it that the environmental laws and protections in this country are either not obeyed or destroyed. We have an Attorney General and a department of Justice which is defunding enforcing the laws that protect people's civil rights.

4. We need to have a change in the constitution to make clear what the issues are involving conflict of interest, and what needs to be done before someone is allowed to take office. Full financial transparency and such issues as tax returns being public need to be made explicit.

5. We need a way that is less traumatic to remove people in the judiciary who have been appointed by an administration that is later shown to have been invalid. Between the invalid election of Trump and McConnell breaking the law, we have the right wing nutty boy, Gorsuch, on the court and bigots and right wing nuts being appointed to other posts in the judiciary. We need a way to remove these people.

6. We need to regulate our social media and hold them responsible for their role in allowing foreign intelligence agencies to disrupt and destroy our ability to hold public discourse. That means officers of a company need to go to jail when they have failed to protect us.

7. We need to make countries such as Russia and to a lesser extent the PRC know that their espionage and disruption of our civic discourse is a cause for war.

8. We need to end gerrymandering for political purposes.

9. We need to have national standards for how an election is held, and how the results can be verified.

This is the minimum that needs to be done, in my opinion. But only if you care about people believing that they live in a fair and just country. If you dont care, then we can continue on this path and our country will be, or already has been, destroyed.

No government is perfect, but in our case we have let things go too far.  Business as usual clearly has failed us.  I hope that our politicians and political elite understand this and do something about it, but I doubt they will.

Are Young People Too Impatient With the Political Process?

I have often heard it said that youth, callow youth, are too impatient with our political process. That they expect the great ship of state to change direction on a dime, not realizing the immense momentum that must be overcome and that many parties must be appeased in our collaborative political process before change can occur.

I have also heard it said that people with experience know how hard it is to change the system and are here for the long haul. They know its a marathon not a sprint, and that only by applying steady pressure over a long period of time and building coalitions can we achieve a more worthwhile polity.

Well, as some wit said, “all generalizations are wrong”. In my case, at least, the exact opposite is true. I used to be patient with the process until I realized how cynical and disingenuous the process was. How often the political process simply lied to steal the money, or to get their way.

And in the last 30 years I have seen our government fail to implement the voting rights laws, even go backwards on this critical issue.  I have seen public education continue to get low priority. I have seen the Dept of Justice fail to implement the law when it involved the murder of citizens for their political beliefs and even straightforward racism.  I have seen the worst criminal abuses of corporations and the rich go unpunished and worse, the hypocrisy of a congress that pretends to disapprove but does not actually enact the legislation that would permit criminal penalties to be applied (assuming the Dept of Justice would act against the rich which is not likely).

I have seen the lip service paid to the poor and disenfranchised which is not backed up by legislation and positive action.  I have seen the tax burden shifted to the middle class and the reality of the corporate tax code. I have seen the appalling "war on drugs" and the lives it has destroyed, every bit as destructive as the drug use it so hypocritically fails to prevent.  Leonard Peltier is still in jail and the FBI goes nuts whenever they think that a president might pardon him and therefore permit justice to exist in the land.

Henceforth, dear political leaders, the new rule is as follows. Fix it now, or we will assume that you are just lying or ineffective.

No more patience, no more slack.

Fix it now or go away.

Is Austria Overtaxing Its Sausage Stands?

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Any right thinking American, upon reading the baseless Austrian complaint against those pillars of American Industry, Starbucks and Amazon, must wonder if Austria is not indeed demanding too much taxes from its sausage stands.

You may read their horrible accusation here in Reuters.

In America, we know to never tax our corporations, from which everything good in our society originates, but instead we put the burden on the worthless people, even those who do not work. These are the scum that should pay taxes. And if they do not work, then they should pay *more* taxes, not less, it seems to me, to make up for their indolence.

Indeed, we know that when the corporation takes out its most virtuous Sausage it will bring forth blessings and goodness that will “trickle down” onto the heads of all of us, both politicians and citizens. To tax the corporation is a sin, because it restricts this flow of corporate goodness.

All politicians in America know this, and so they wait anxiously by the trough of the corporations, yapping like newborn birds for their nourishment directly from this All-Beneficent Sausage. We call this most healthy flow “the political donation” but which might better be called the “Food of the Gods”, the very life-blood of our political system and the American Way..

Therefore let Austria learn from us, and learn the wisdom of freeing the corporation from this pernicious burden, these so-called taxes, which if left unchecked might affect shareholder value.

The Drug Companies Have Nothing to Worry About

In the following article in USA Today about Mylan, the exploitative company behind the notorious EpiPen, the authors make the point that Mylan is not the only guilty party, but that many drug manufacturers use their market position to extract monopolistic fees from their victims.  See the article here.

In particular, they have a fabulous quote by a market analyst about why investors have nothing to worry about from government legislation.

Some think the fears about government attention on high drug profit margins are overblown. "We believe that this effort (efforts against Mylan's price hikes) likely will follow the same playbook that lawmakers used to shame Gilead, Valeant (VRX), and others," according to Spencer Perlman, analyst at Height Securities. "Congressional hearings and a press onslaught, but no substantive legislative action."

In other words, our politicians, corrupt to the very core, pay lip service to the problem but take no action. As always. As long as they get their money from the corporations, they don't really care about anything else.

The problem with this “business as usual”, is that we are expected to be patient with the process, to trust these people, our representatives, to have our interests at heart, and very clearly they do not. Being patient, and trusting them is in fact part of their game. Therefore it is a reasonable response to demand substantive legislation immediately, or take direct action through the proposition system, and then, of course, to expel these corrupt miscreants, our elected representatives, from office.

Of course, anyone who knows the history here knows there is very little chance of anything good happening. The pharmaceuticals industry is spending over $100 million in the state of California to defeat a proposition designed to allow Medicare to get the same prices as the VA department.

That would be horrible, wouldnt it, to help poor people get their medication?  Why, that violates everything that America and our political system stands for.  You can be sure that our politicians will not allow this to happen.